Memory of Mimi

                  “Oh, Danny, it’s so nice to hear from you. You know that I pray for you every…”

                  “Yes, Mildred, I do. And how are you, anyway?”

                  “Well, it’s all as it’s meant to be. Cold already in Moorhead—you feel it on the phone?”

                  “Ha! The coils of your phone, I’m imagining now—everything comes closer this side of Thanksgiving. And how will you celebrate that, Aunt Mimi?”

                  “Thanksgiving? Oh, you know, Larry and Vi will come over, and talk about Hank, then pumpkin pie at their house, hoping Warren and the girls will come by. A vigil at Good Shepherd—but who am I fooling? Well past my bedtime by then. But what are you doing, Danny? And when are you coming back to visit?”

                  In the R.E.M. cove of my blankets, I’m sifting the sands that confirm she is dead: twenty years ago, and more. Dad, too, whom I dreamed of last week, the latest new moon, as cycles of northern lights come and go. In that scene he drove through a mixture of jackpine and aspen and slough, talking with someone beside him and equally me in the backseat—usually the ‘shotgun’ position (never our term) would be naturally open to me. I’m sure we weren’t talking of Mimi; I’m more sure she wasn’t aboard, riding shotgun. I’m less sure my dream wouldn’t ask such a question, like ‘Dad, what are your memories of Aunt Mildred?’

                  Loquacious he’d be, the best attribute for replies were his eyes, wizened and bent on the needs of the road. ‘Mimi,’ he’d adagio say, ‘was third or fourth in any relay of dire information. She heard when I fished out the baby that fell in the neighbor’s well, and no hope would happen that minute, that day. She shook her head at the hint of divorce, a breach of the sine qua non that she only enjoyed for some childless years, until her own husband died. But there were some joyful things we’d talk about, third or fourth in the queue.’ ‘Like what?’ I’d ask from my unlikely backseat, ‘like jumping on huge intertubes on the grass leading down to Pelican Lake?’

                  “What did you think of that, Mimi?” I asked on the phone.

                  She paused and probably pursed her lips. “I don’t… really know what you’re talking about, Danny. Did you say—”

                  I didn’t dare let go yet of Dad. He’d remain five minutes or so in my dream—the cadence of such I had been through some fifty, some sixty, some rig the fool system so I don’t need to count times again. Dad brought his brother-in-law, Del, to Pelican Lake, this side of sobriety (Del’s) and divorce. Mimi must have been there—I don’t imagine the place otherwise—and presuming the pontoon had come in to roost after Larry or Hank’s piloting, Del thought it wise to look out at the lake, taking a deck chair and setting it square at the end of the dock. Physics be damned, when one butts into a chair, the legs tend to slide, and everyone yelled from the shore: ‘Del, watch the edge!’ while he cupped his ear and folded in, saying ‘Wha--?’ before tumbling into the water. This time, Dad fished out his body, duly alive.

                  “Quite honestly, I forgot what I said… I mean, I was listening—”

                  “Listening to yourself?” Aunt Mildred suddenly channeled philosophy, if after a pause providing a chuckle, an ingenuous gather of love.

                  “I was probably recalling—you remember that time, Mimi, when the ice caused my Plymouth to slide into another guy’s car, and since he was insured and I, um, was not.., I needed nine hundred bucks to pay for his grill?”

                  Like the line had been cut.

                  “Mimi, do you remember how awkward it was when I asked for—”

                  “I can’t understand you, Danny. Now say again slowly: what happened, when?”

                  I borrowed a benjamin each from not-quite-nine friends, then sold the darn Fury to another Danny—Steinmetz, brother of Tammy (the love of my life). ‘You introduced us, Dad.’ And though dreams were apparently over, I rolled what he’d say in my pillow: ‘you bet. And what do you think Danny did to your car?’ ‘I can’t imagine. Fact is, I know, but do tell it, Dad, from your point of view.’

                  “Are you still there?”

                  “Yeah, Mimi—I’m sorry I’m not being so—”

                  “That’s ok, dear. You know that I pray for you every…”

                  Dad would have narrated this way: ‘that scamp painted as much as he paid you—fifty bucks, yes?—on the hood and maybe the doors. He entered it into the derby and smashed it to smithereens. His sisters smashed theirs in the previous Powder Puff race—’ ‘Tammy?’ I begged, cotton-mouthed. ‘Did she—’

                  “Every day. You know that, Danny? Danny?”

                  I breathed out like my dad, with a lungful ‘hwao’. “I do, Mildred. I know that you do.”

                  “I’m so glad that you called, thinking of me.”

                  “I love you, Mimi. I haven’t been so good at—”

                  “You remember we planted them trees? Your grandma and Stan did the tamping, after Greg augured holes…”

                  “You and me planted seedlings, Aunt Mimi. Three thousand red pines, and five hundred white.”

                  “Oh, my! Were there so many we grew? What happened to them?”
                  I pulsed for another release into dream. Aware that it couldn’t contrive, I struggled to stay on the line. “Greg harvested them when their lowest branches were yea high.”

                  “How high?”

                  Reasonable question, gesturing over an old-fashioned phone. “You could walk under them easily.”

                  Her chuckle was easy, unleashed. “Oh, Danny, I’m as shrunk as a shrew. It wouldn’t be hard for me to walk under them. But you! You’re still as tall as—”

                  “I’m not so tall, Mildred. That’s maybe the reason I called.”

                  “I don’t understand,” she began, but quickly, “but Danny?”

                  “Yeah?”

                  “I pray for you every...”

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2019)